Study Examines Infant Mortality on Aircraft
Infants sleeping in their parents’ laps on long flights face a small but noticeable risk of suffocating to death, reports a study in the current issue of Pediatric Critical Care Medicine.
Titled “Pediatric Fatalities at 30,000 Feet: Characterizing Pediatric Deaths on Commercial Airline Flights,” the study found that nine of the ten children who died in the period from January 2010 to June 2013 were younger than two years old.
Three of the infants were found unresponsive on long transcontinental flights when the parent holding them awoke from sleep, in tragedies similar to infants suffocating in their parents’ beds at night.
The study concludes that while “pediatric in-flight medical emergencies rarely result in death, the high share of fatalities involving children under the age of two years (lap infants) is intriguing and warrants further study, particularly as co-sleeping has been implicated in sudden infant death syndrome.”